The 15,523rd Count and the Radical Act of Stillness

In prison, they call it count time, and every inmate has to be counted. In Florida, it feels like it happens all damn day. An officer steps into the dorm and screams “COUNT TIME,” and whatever you’re doing dies right then and there. You rush back to your bunk and wait for the officer to count your body, because it feels like you’re no longer a real person. I was reduced to a soul‑crushing low number, V19743. Over 8.5 years those counts add up to well over fifteen thousand reminders that I wasn’t a person in their eyes. My name was my number. I was the state’s property. I was their inventory. I was their sweat equity, the body they tried to tear down one count at a time, and they still had the audacity to call it justice.

Count is soul-stripping. It works its way into the deepest parts of who you are and takes a piece every time they count you, bit by bit, strip by strip, rip by rip, until resistance is no more. It steals your ability to say the things I’m witnessing, living, day to day, are wrong. That officer abusing that incarcerated person is wrong. Locking someone in confinement for months or years at a time is wrong. The system doesn’t just take your freedom. It takes your identity and tries to convince you that you deserve to be nothing but a no-good piece of shit convict.

What happens between those headcounts is what matters.

When I hit Lawtey CI after multiple max prisons, the trauma in that place was thick in the air. I’d already survived the worst of the Florida DOC: targeted violence at Suwannee CI Annex during their infamous death year, and morgue duty as my first job at Lake Butler, where bodies came in faster than peace ever did. Men in those dorms didn’t just serve time. The DOC, the isolation, and the terror were eating our minds alive. All of us, before we came, had been through it elsewhere.

Lawtey was a faith‑and‑character‑based camp, a medium‑security facility where staying meant showing up for a set number of classes and programs. If you signed out of the faith‑and‑character program, you didn’t just stop going to class. You got transferred out of Lawtey and dropped back into regular state-sanctioned Florida prison hell.

Change didn’t happen on its own. It came through pain and suffering. Pain was something I accepted as a daily and nightly part of my existence. I used to wish for more pain, because in a fractured mind and from the books I read, I knew pain sometimes makes you stronger. Pain under pressure makes you harder, tougher, more resilient to suffering. It put determination in my bones. That was my shitty dinner tray. That was my survival, until I learned another way.

I owe that other way to my family and loved ones who never stopped believing in me, to the books I read, and to yoga. In an environment built to destroy people through guard violence and constant survival posturing, stretching my body wasn’t a wellness hobby. Oh no, it was a fierce, defiant act of self‑preservation. Reclaiming my breath right in front of the guards is an active refusal to let them destroy more parts of me.

I practiced yoga every day and kept up with my other calisthenics: pushups, pullups, squats, and lunges. My flexibility and strength came back fast. I drew stick‑figure yoga men to design sequences and tested each flow right there between the bunks, then shared those drawings with men who asked for help healing their bodies. If they had neck, leg, or shoulder injuries, my scribbled stick figures on notebook paper helped them. Once a sequence worked, it went into my yoga folder. Another small success in a place built to break us. Another mind and body healed, and that’s when others started to take notice.

They saw I didn’t give a fuck about public opinion, guards, or other inmates. Guys on the compound respected how I did my time, and something about my passion pulled them in on a scale that even for me was hard to imagine.

My aim was to never make excuses. Not ever. When it comes to making shit happen, nobody could push me as hard as I could push myself, and nobody could fuck me up as much as myself. I was my best friend or my worst enemy. Police would come in and strip me down to my boxers, ransack the dorm, flip my mattress, toss my property, and snatch pictures out of my photo album and tear up those masterfully scribbled tiny stick figure men. Once they left, I’d put my clothes back on, make my bed, and go right back to my practice. Mop the floor around my bunk, drop into another flow, and get it the fuck in. No excuses. It is what it is.

I’ll never forget when dudes on the compound asked me to create a real yoga program. My first reaction was “fuck no.” Prison trains you to feel like a one‑man army, like every decision has to be made only for your personal survival, and saying yes means more heat from officers, more attention from the chaplain, more chances to get locked up, beat up, thrown in confinement, but it also meant doing something that wasn’t solely about me. That’s when shit got real in my eyes.

With Asa and Lang, other incarcerated men, I started working on a proposal. Asa did most of the research. He had computer access and went through books, putting together charts and stats showing how yoga could lower violence on the compound, and Asa utilized my writing ability to help make it land. Hours on hours, days on days, weeks on weeks of work to prove what we already felt and knew. Yoga can help us heal. The chaplain didn’t care. He saw yoga as competition for his Christian programs and denied the proposal outright. Healing that didn’t move through him was a threat. We weren’t trying to convert anyone. I wasn’t a perfectly disciplined yogi, but I saw how yoga was changing my life for the better. I saw men on the compound respect what I had going on, and more than anything I saw how my family was proud of me.

Things shifted when I got the rec orderly job. The coaches were old school and treated the men who worked for them fairly. As long as I mopped the gym and cleaned the weights, I could do my thing, whatever I wanted, and I wanted to learn more yoga. I studied and practiced three times a day in that big gym. Over time the coaches trusted me, and I knew other men respected me. That trust was the crack in the wall, the small opening that let something different slip into a place built only for punishment and despair.

I went to the main coach and told him I wanted a yoga program. My homeboy Chevy already had a CrossFit‑style class approved as a health and fitness class, under the coaches’ control instead of the chaplain’s. I asked why yoga couldn’t be the same. Asa and I would teach. All the coach had to do was check names off a list. He talked shit, called us soft, especially Asa, he said folding myself into a pretzel was bad for me, but he listened and cared. In the end he took the proposal to administration and the warden, and somehow it came back with a yes.

We put the word out. The coaches approved fifty men on the callout. We thought it was a long shot to fill that many spots. What we didn’t know was how much interest had already been steadily growing. Men from other dorms, men I barely knew, wanted in. Over a hundred signed up. The first fifty got in without a problem.

In prison we don’t have yoga mats. My mom told her friends what we were doing and they donated mats for us. The warden signed off. Then two hating officers ran to him and said the mats could be thrown over the razor wire and used in an escape. Foam became a security risk. The warden didn’t want to piss off his sergeants, so he backed out. Mom got a call telling her to come get the mats or they’d be tossed. That’s how scared the system was of simple pieces of foam and a group of men choosing to breathe together.

We held class on the slick gym floor without those cushy yoga mats. Pools of sweat formed under every man. It got slippery, and if someone fell, he got up and kept going. We started simple, sun salutations and basic poses. Asa taught while I walked the room, helping men find their footing and stay in a pose without breaking. Then Asa and I would switch and reverse the roles. Little by little, the energy changed. It wasn’t just exercise. It was men who’d been counted like inventory learning how to own their breath.

One day, while we were deep in the warrior series, the gym doors opened and staff walked in. They weren’t there for class. They were there to see what we were doing. They expected trouble. They wanted trouble. Instead, they saw rows of incarcerated men doing yoga on the gymnasium floor, moving in sync with no mats, no music, nothing but focus, and sweat.

They laughed. They muttered insults. They called us names like “a bunch of sissies.” We kept going.

We didn’t climb Everest that day, and we didn’t win some clean victory. What we did was show that in a place built to crush resistance, a group of men could still stand together, breathe together, and refuse to let the system own our fucking minds. That’s what the yoga classes were. It wasn’t about perfect poses or who could stretch further. It was about carving out a few square feet of radical stillness in a facility designed to snuff it out, completely.

The system didn’t let that kind of healing stand without a response. Not long after the yoga class started taking hold under the coaches’ purview as a health class, I was suddenly placed on a mandatory callout that landed at the exact time as our program. I couldn’t get out of it. On paper it was just another class. In reality it was a quiet way to pull me out of the room and drain the momentum. Asa and Lang kept teaching, but numbers dropped. Some officers don’t just dislike healing. They make sure it dies.

Then it got more fucked up. A sergeant who’d already marked me decided to push things further. One false report turned into a stack of disciplinary writeups that could’ve sent me to long‑term confinement. He claimed I shoved him and violated movement rules. In Florida prisons we call it “stacking DRs.” Stack enough of them and you’re history.

The message was clear: sign out of the camp where I’d finally found some peace, or face years on CM (closed management, which can be years in confinement). Lawtey CI had been a game changer for me, and now the price for building a yoga program was being thrown in my face. I even asked another sergeant straight up why the man hated me so much, told him he could fight me one‑on‑one if that’s what he wanted, that there was no need to bury me with paperwork and ship me off. He didn’t want that fight. Instead, the officer I asked to communicate my offer respected it and did me a solid by letting me sign out of the faith‑and‑character camp and transfer back into another main institutional hell, avoiding years in confinement. He thought it was bad‑ass I offered to fight that crooked sergeant, twisted respect, but respect nonetheless.

I signed the paper, went back to my dorm, and watched my mother cry when I told her I was being moved during visitation, yet again. She couldn’t understand why every time things went right, the system found a way to blow it the fuck up. Then she did what mothers who’ve had enough do. She fought back.

While I was serving my time, my mom became a prison‑reform activist after she saw the degradation we all suffered behind bars. She spoke on the radio and at events, helped other families and other men, and for me she went to war. I even heard her on NPR one time. All my friends thought that was really badass and so did I. She called classification at Lawtey. When that went nowhere, she called classification in Tallahassee and told them she’d raise hell if I was transferred. She even went up there where the big wigs of the department are said to reside. She told them she knew who’d set me up and was willing to say their names out loud. She told them her son was finally doing better and that ripping him out of the one place where healing was happening was wrong.

Men on the yard felt it too. They were pissed I was leaving. Some told me yoga had helped them quit smoking, stop using drugs, keep them from stabbing someone, from bucking and going ape shit. They learned to breathe through it all. We’d turned that yard into something different, and now the system wanted it un‑the‑fuck‑done.

I went to sleep expecting to be on the transfer bus after I learned from the laundry man I’d be leaving the following day. Laundry dudes always learn who’s leaving first for a transfer, but in the morning, I was still there. The bus came and left without me. When I walked to work, officers who’d been part of the setup started talking trash, calling me Super Boy, asking why I wasn’t gone. I didn’t know yet that my mother had backed them into a corner and made it clear they’d be held to account if they tried to bury me somewhere else.

Later, those same sergeants pulled my mom aside and apologized. They thanked her for not naming names or making it public on the radio, because they knew they’d done something they weren’t supposed to do and that it could come back on them hard. One of them got promoted to lieutenant afterward and told me straight up the only reason he was wearing that rank was because my mom never said anything and that I should tell her thank you.

Healing in prison always came with some fucked up price. The price was officers who hated me, a chaplain who hated me, a yoga program that stalled the minute I was pulled out of it. But fuck it. I stayed at Lawtey. My mom’s love and rage kept me there. In a system that counted me as inventory, they had to start counting her as a threat, and when she felt it was necessary, she could be very threatening, indeed.

After that, things didn’t suddenly get easy. I still had run‑ins with staff, but something had shifted. Enough officers respected the way I carried myself, the way I didn’t back down, that they stopped trying to kill the program outright. For close to another year and a half I taught yoga twice a day on the formal schedule, up front near the chaplain’s area, and even he eventually calmed down about it. I wasn’t trying to change anyone’s faith. I was trying to help men heal and take control over their surroundings and their lives.

On top of those classes I ran looser sessions out on the yard for guys who weren’t officially on the callout. Word spread. By the time I left Lawtey, hundreds of men had cycled through our practice. Some showed up once. Some came each time class was in session. All of it started as a way for me not to lose my mind and became a way for other men to get theirs back.

My yoga kept progressing. On the yard I spent a whole summer kicking up into handstands until I could hold them without a wall. I learned peacock pose, balancing on my forearms, and men noticed. At first, they joked it would help them impress some yoga hottie one day if they ever got out. Underneath the jokes something else was happening. We were learning how to breathe when a chokehold tightened, how not to panic, how to control impulses instead of exploding.

Breathing like that was new. Yeah, our bodies do it automatically. Healthy bodies breathe. But in hairy situations, an officer being an asshole, an inmate being disrespectful, nights when my mind wouldn’t shut off, I learned I could calm myself using what I’d learned from yoga. Control my breathing and I could control my impulses. If I didn’t feed the urge to lash out or say something that made it worse or stab somebody, I could sit, meditate, and let that shit go. Always coming back to my breath.

Building the first inmate‑led yoga program in the Florida Department of Corrections wasn’t just about stretches and shapes. It was an all‑out war against an administrative regime that treats human healing like an act of fucking treason. Wardens and officers didn’t want rehabilitation. They wanted numb submission. When we did yoga, they treated us like we were security threats. They threatened us with solitary confinement, confiscated books, blocked mats as an escape risk, stacked DRs, and used petty rules to wreck our peace. A system that routinely tolerates staff corruption and institutional violence came unhinged at the sight of incarcerated men reclaiming control over our own bodies and minds.

We fought that bureaucracy for months, keeping our discipline, refusing to stop. Never quit, an old philosophy. We won some battles, and lost others. But we proved something inside those walls that stillness isn’t passive. It’s an unshakeable weapon. You can lock a man’s body in prison, count him all damn day, call him property, treat him like inventory, but you can’t fully control him or his mind if he refuses to hand it over.

That last count of my sentence, the fifteen-thousand-five-hundred-twenty-third count after years of this, meant the most. I knew I’d made my time count. I’d helped, taught, and connected with other men to build something that said we’re more than convicts or trash. We resisted a system that tried to destroy us and own our hearts.

In a place where you’re expected to either submit, explode, or go numb, choosing to be still on purpose is the loudest kind of rebellion.

Yoga showed me I’m more than a number, more than what DOC says I am. All of us are. Every down dog and handstand is another way to resist, another way to fight back and say fuck the system that’s designed to erase our identity. The radical act of stillness is how we took control back and hurled it right in the system’s fucking face.

Emmett Tatter is a writer, prison reform advocate, and certified yoga teacher based in Saint Augustine, Florida. He served a ten-year sentence in the Florida Department of Corrections and lectures on mental health, addiction, and criminal justice at colleges including Flagler College and St. Mary’s College of Maryland. His memoir COUNT TIME is seeking publication with endorsements from NYT bestselling author Les Standiford, Dr. Baz Dreisinger (author of Incarceration Nations), former Chief Judge Pamela L. North, former CNN editor John DeDakis, and others.